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St Fagans Museum Initial ideas

As part of our research for our interactive museum exhibit we today visited St Fagans museum of welsh life situated just outside of Cardiff. The museum is part of the National Museum of Wales and houses original buildings from around wales that have been transported to the site and re-built/restored as an attempt to document welsh history and save historic buildings.

This is a potential location for our interactive narrative story and so in preparation for our meeting with Emma Routley (National museum project manager) on Friday we decided to recce the site to give us an idea of what the museum already offered in terms of interactive elements and what we could potentially create.

In terms of interactive elements the museum had very little on the day we visited. They had a few demonstrations of flour making and baking and a number of members of staff on hand to act as curators for individual exhibits. One exhibit did have an element of user interaction, the St Tilos church had small information boards where visitors were encourages to walk with them around the exhibit and identify artifacts.

Some of the advantages of creating an experience here would be the size of the area and the fact that it is outdoors, this would be ideal for a GPS based application. The majority of the buildings are naturally very dark inside so this opens up the opportunity to maybe incorporate some sort of projection imaging into our story.

With the museum being free and open daily we would have a loot of scope in terms of access to the site, being able to carry out research as we need but the downside is the museums distance form our base with is being a 1 hour drive from Bristol.

Thinking of story ideas, the exhibits didn’t really have any character based history, they were more building and purpose related historical stories so we’d have to think of characters and a narrative to guide the audience through the exhibit.